Haute Diplomatie

As the Middle East gets finally exhausted

Russia Pyotr Veliky missile cruiser makes port call in Tartus, Syria, 2023, via Countercurrents.

Couple of thoughts:

Obviously, Trump did not write this. The thinking is banal, but it's moderately complex and coherently designed toward a single main idea, as Vance notes, the question of how the Syria events will affect Russia. Completely different from Trump's "weave". Also not a subject to which our narcissist-in-chief is likely to devote that much consideration, with participants who aren't his own enemies—and while Russia might be considered one of his friends, he doesn't usually talk about his friends in this tone, as having made a mistake. He's usually "saying nice things" about his friends in return for their saying nice things about him, not speculating about them in this detached way.

To understand what he really means, you'd have to have an idea who wrote it, and I don't know that, other than that it's clearly not Stephen Miller or Dan Scavino (who is mainly responsible for memes and videos).

I wondered for a moment if it might be ChatGPT: Trump tells the minions he needs to make a statement on the Syria situation, but he can't explain what it is he wants to say, other than to make some kind of dig against Obama and his efforts on Syria, and they don't know what to write. "Let's get the AI to do it!"

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That might explain the way the author seems to be a few hours behind the rest of us, unaware at 8:30 this morning that Damascus had already been taken and Assad had fled when we all found out before midnight.

But the other thing that occurred to me is that Trump has been talking about foreign affairs recently with somebody whose opinion he very much values, Emmanuel Macron, purveyor of very classy French entertainment and parades, who he hung out with that the reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris and who would certainly be trying to guide him as much as possible on the subject of Ukraine, and may very likely have seen the Syria events as providing a way to talk about it without endangering Trump's fragile ego: a way of portraying the Russians as losers. That casualty figure of "over 600,000 soldiers" lost to Russia in Ukraine isn't something he knows, or something that came to him from a pro-Russian source, for instance, but it could easily have come from Macron, or President Zelenskyy, who was also present for some of the interaction. The Russians are being humiliated in Syria because they're overcommitted in Ukraine, and it's best for them to get out quickly (from which it's easy to get to it's being best for them to get out quickly from Ukraine as well—and you, Mr. Trump, are just the man to sell it to them; unlike Obama, who Russia dominated in Syria, you could dominate Russia in Ukraine, and very classy French NATO, which once laughed at you, would acclaim you as a savior, and it wouldn't cost you any money). The "concern" Joyce Vance is wondering at is actually concern trolling, by an expert.

And it would have been one of the American attendees at that conversation, not Trump himself, who submitted the ideas to the AI, or even wrote it up as a Truth directly, at Trump's request ("be sure to say Obama looked stupid!").

And ugly as it is, I think Macron might be right to take this approach, where millions of lives are at stake, at the mercy of immense power wielded by really stupid and irresponsible men, as a chance to end the war on terms Ukrainians can tolerate.

Russia seems to have succumbed to total exhaustion, just at the point where you'd expect its leader to be happily anticipating the advent of another Trump presidency: abandoning not just Syria, but Iran (which was unable to help Assad without Russian air support, and sat the whole thing out), and all of its clients in the region (including North Africa), with its surrender of its Syrian naval base in Tartus.

I think something similar may be happening with another Trump friend, in Israel, where Netanyahu is scheduled to begin testimony in Tel Aviv in his criminal corruption trial on Tuesday, after the last desperate delay failed to impress the court, and the government, trying to withdraw and not quite withdrawing from Lebanon under its shaky France-brokered ceasefire, is also back to making possibly serious proposals for a Gaza ceasefire,

“We have seen a lot of encouragement from the incoming administration [of US President-elect Donald Trump] in order to achieve a deal even before the president comes [into] office” in January, [Qatar prime minister] Al Thani said.

“And that actually made us [try] … to put it back on track. We’ve been engaging in the past couple of weeks,” he added.

Even as Trump himself has been issuing orders for the release of all the hostages before his inauguration:

“there will be hell to pay” if captives held in Gaza are not released by the time he enters the White House on January 20.

“Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America. RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW!” he wrote on social media.

Is Trump really so anxious for this agreement to take place, while Netanyahu is on trial, on Biden's watch? Or has somebody told him it's going to happen, and is he preemptively trying to take credit for it?